On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote:
P.S. Regarding Gregory's response (that came in while writing this) potential abuse is not really a concern. We have a block button. The trick is coming up with a policy or guideline on usage so people know what's acceptable and what's not.
It's not just me pointing this out... proposals like this have been previously rejected on this basis:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9415 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8068
Blocking is a good tool to stop abuse but it only works once we've found it. Someone could sneakily create __noindex__ pages, especially via transcluding no-indexing templates.
People do sneaky mainspace vandalism too.
Alternately (thinking while I type here, bear with me) we could have a MediaWiki: page listing pages that we don't want indexed. Possibly specifying a template would catch all pages that template is transcluded to? Then it could be protected if it became an issue.
Having to read some enormous page every page-load wouldn't be good. It would be better to do the right thing on average per-namespace then use something in the pages to control exceptions.
That is how I meant it -- a page of exceptions. In the case of categories, it could point at just a template we put on non-encyclopedic categories, if "noindex-by-transclusion" can work.